Helping renters and buyers easily compare properties so they can make better decisions when looking for their ideal home.
WHAT IS HOME RATER?
Home Rater is a conceptual app that helps home renters and buyers make more informed decisions by letting them score each property based on their own criteria and displaying concise data.
KEY GOAL
Create a way to rank viewed properties based on features that matter most to the users.
Tie in a checklist to keep track of the application process.
MY ROLE
Concept, Research, UX Design, UI Design
PROBLEM
Finding a home can be exhausting. You go on open homes, contact agents and landlords, prepare all the requirements.
When you finally see the house that you like, there’s a good chance somebody already beat you to it. You also have to see where you can compromise: storage space, location, price, etc.
When we searched for our rental home, we used a Google sheet to track the houses we were considering to apply for.
We narrowed down our choices based on a tally of points for each house. It was rudimentary and I saw the opportunity to improve on it.
It raised a question:
How might we make the process of house-hunting for renters and buyers easier, so that the experience is more enjoyable?
PROTO PERSONAS
I thought about who else could benefit from a house rating app. So I came up with proto personas and thought about what problems it might solve for them. I had them in mind while designing a solution that would meet their needs and was simple to use.
WIREFRAMING
From our crude Google sheet, I sketched out wireframes to quickly translate my ideas onto paper.
The primary features that aimed to solve the proto personas’ pain points were:
- A way to collate all the information and photos of prospective properties
- A system to score each property so that they can objectively be sorted according to set filters
- A To Do List that tracks the progress of the application process
I sought to make it easy for the user to add and score the properties whether onsite during an inspection, or in retrospect.
LO FIDELITY MOCKUPS
Ideas were further fleshed out when Lo Fi mockups were created in Balsamiq.
I realised that not all experiences during open homes are the same.
So I designed it in a way where it can be used even while preoccupied at an open home or during the users’ free time.
HI FIDELITY MOCKUP & PROTOTYPE
The design was further refined when the mockup and prototype were created in Figma.
To make adoption easier, I modeled the interface closely with Trade Me, knowing that majority of the users would have found their properties there.
